There is a 2000-year-old confidence game called “watch the pea.” Essentially the pea is under one of three covers, and the covers are then rapidly moved and the onlooker has to bet on the one with the pea. We have just seen the Washington version of “watch the pea” and pretty much everybody got it wrong.

The Trump Administration has just announced that is not proceeding with the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” which was to be a $1.7 billion dollar payoff to anybody who had been wrongfully prosecuted by the government which included, remarkably enough, the January 6 rioters who broke into the Capitol in order to stop the vote counting which ended up with Biden beating Trump. This “Anti-Weaponization Fund” was part of the “settlement” reached by Trump with the Justice Department which he controls.

Unfortunately, politicians have an unhealthy habit of, in the words of a long ago Maryland legislator, “of continuing to beat a dead horse to death.” The same is true for editorial writers. Recently a Baltimore Sun editorial declared that integrity demanded that Congress pass a law which would forbid this now abandoned fund in the future. Really? It is extraordinarily unlikely that anyone not named Trump would ever come up with such a bizarre scheme. It was best described by one senator as “stupid on stilts.”

But the pea is that part of the settlement of a contrived lawsuit which insulates Trump, his family and his companies from IRS audits which have been in process for a number of years. The lawsuit in question was Trump’s $10 billion claim against the IRS for revealing details of his tax returns during his first term. It turns out that it was a contractor, not an IRS employee, who revealed these details as well as details of many other wealthy individuals. He is now serving a 5-year prison term.

There were multiple defenses to this lawsuit, including that it was filed too late under the existing statute of limitations. The Justice Department ignored the defenses which its client (IRS) had outlined and “settled” the case, not by paying any money which the lawsuit originally called for, but by insulating Trump from existing audits involving up to $100 million in unpaid taxes.

The Republican senators who missed the pea apparently cannot see where the pea is and where it always has been.  As per usual, the whole masquerade was to get Trump immunity. The only person with the possible ability to stop this scam is Federal Judge Kathleen Williams who had jurisdiction over the case before the “settlement.” Normally, a judge is not involved in a settlement and does not have to approve a settlement where the parties have agreed.

However, that is not necessarily the case where the settlement is a result of collusion between the parties. That appears to be the case here and Judge Williams has ordered the parties to brief that issue. 35 former Federal judges filed papers asserting that the lawsuit was a collusive lawsuit where the parties were not truly adverse, a fact that Trump seemed to have admitted when he said that he was having to strike a settlement with himself.

Both the reality and the optics of this settlement are appalling. Trump’s lawyers settled with the Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who used to be Trump‘s personal lawyer in a number of cases before his reelection. When Trump was reelected, he installed Blanche as the Deputy Attorney General and now has indicated he is going to nominate him to be the Attorney General. It is no wonder that Trump thought he was settling with himself because he was and the ever-helpful Todd Blanche gets to be nominated to be the Attorney General.

But Blanche himself may be collateral damage.  His bumbling defense before the Senate of “stupid on stilts” may sink his nomination. 

And that would be a good thing.